The Places: Where Are They Talking?

We’ve looked at the people involved in a conversation, and
at the topics you should be investigating. Where are those conversations
happening?

There are hundreds of thriving communities, thousands of forums, and
millions of comment threads to cover, but there are a small number of
communities that will drive much of your traffic. Fortunately for us,
popular communities also follow power laws. We also have tools such as
search to help us, and many of the communities make their sites searchable
through APIs and aggregators.

Your first instinct might be to register yourself on as many sites
as possible, some of which are listed in Figure 13-19, and search for
conversations involving your brand.

Figure 13-19. The now-defunct usernamecheck.com allowed you to
verify whether your name was taken on popular Web 2.0 sites

That’s a good step, but while it might reserve your seat at the
communal table, it won’t let you sit down and interact. Before we delve
into the ways we can track online activity, let’s first cover the types of
community on the Web today.

Note

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Different Community Models

We can divide up models of online interaction according to
two important dimensions: the complexity of their messages, and how openly those messages are shared.

Message complexity ...

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